The silence in the back of the Maybach was no longer the silence of two strangers; it was the heavy, suffocating quiet of a family being forged in a furnace of secrets and rage. Toby sat between us, his small legs dangling off the edge of the expensive leather seat, his attention entirely captured by the silver lion emblem on Silas’s keychain. He had no idea that the man sitting next to him had just dismantled our entire world with a single phone call.
I watched Silas. He didn't look like a man who had just found a son; he looked like a general who had just reclaimed a lost territory. His jaw was so tight I feared it might crack, and his eyes those cold, obsidian depths never left Toby. It wasn't the look of a doting father. It was the look of a man who realized he had been cheated, and h
